Game 26: Strange Antiquities

I recall having a good time with developer Bad Viking's initial foray, Strange Horticulture. Getting into the minutiae of plant identification with invented herbs and flowers was surprisingly enjoyable, and judging from appearances it looks like Strange Antiquities will be following a winning formula.

Indeed, what if a powerful artifact were to fall into the wrong hands? Like mine?

We begin when Eli, the antiquities shop owner, has to leave town for a couple days and reluctantly leaves the shop in our care.

Thanks for the vote of confidence in your apprentice, Eli!

He leaves us with a reference book, and I'm enjoying just reading it.

Some really interesting - and occasionally dangerous - items are listed in here.

Eli departs with an admonishment to not open any of the locked drawers or cabinets.

You and I both know that won't be happening. This is my shop now!

Right off the bat I notice there's plenty of little objects and doodads to play with. The clock on the wall changes time if you pull on the pendulum and there's a way to get it to flip to show moon phases. There's a little wheel handle behind the counter that raises some sort of puzzle box, and the pedestals at the bottom of the counter seem to be large buttons that can be weighted down by objects.

And that's before we actually look at any of the artifacts on these shelves!

You can examine objects in detail with various senses and then label and categorize them.

One thing that's immediately apparent is that Eli was too lazy to label or attach prices of any of his store's wares, so I'm as much in the dark as any customers that wander in here. Ah well, we'll just muddle through somehow. First customer walks in while I'm trying to figure out if the plants are powerful reality-defying artifacts of yore or just houseplants.

I think I'm going to introduce myself this way from now on

Thomas Pope wants a replacement for his hunter's boon, so it's off to the book to figure out what that is. No tutorial here, I'm immediately running a shop and rifling through a (delightfully written) reference manual to ensure that I'm giving Mr. Pope top quality customer service.

Tom, since YOU want it and YOU know what these things look like how about YOU find it?

I start by inspecting the two animal-shaped objects on the right since they seem like good candidates, but end up deciding they're not the right ones because they're made of clay and wood - I was hoping one might be carved out of bone since Hunters Boons are made from trophies. Then I spy a pendant on the left that looks like a tooth. The game doesn't explicitly tell me that it's made from an animal but it seems like it might fit, so when I present it to Thomas I'm still not certain if it's the correct object until I've finalized the choice.

One satisfied customer!

Success here unlocks another book page, which means that there could be some objects in the store that aren't yet detailed in the book.

As I identify items I take care to use the labeling system to note them - unlike Eli I am going to label these things so I don't need to figure out what something is more than once.

By customer number three I'm already questioning whether this guy is actually human. Something strange is going on in the town - Ravens have been gathering in great numbers and it's got people on edge.

I guess if I wanted normal customers I should have apprenticed at a coffee shop

At least all of these people so far can name the thing they want. As the days go by I suspect I'll see people start to give more vague descriptions as word gets out about how awesome I am at artifact stuff and the rubes wander in. Day 1 is complete with no misidentifications. I suspect the gauge in the bottom right is a health bar of sorts and I'll fail if I get too many wrong.

I'm going to look around the shop and make a cursory attempt to try to identify each unknown entry from the book - anything I can identify now eliminates possibilities from future requests, and this shop is in dire need of organization. I don't know how I'm going to reorganize it yet but I'll figure something out.

The shop is bigger than it first appears. Maybe I'll start with moving everything that's on the side panels into view.

Ooooh, I bet Eli keeps the good stuff under lock and key

There's more to identifying objects than just the descriptive examinations - I was waving this temperature magnet thing (one side is cold the other is warm) in circles when I noticed that passing it in front of the candles dimmed the light from them.

I still have no idea what it is but it's very cool.

I also found some weights in an unlocked cabinet as well as scales, so I can determine how heavy things are.

I was able to tentatively identify about six more of the objects here, and gave them white labels to remind myself that these aren't positive identifications.

Moving on to the next day, I acquired a mysterious card and it showed up on this strange board:

I'm utterly clueless on this one.

The day starts off with an elder woman dropping off a book that she borrowed from Eli. It sheds some light on what all these symbols around the board mean.

I have no idea what to actually use this knowledge for. Yet.

I did quite badly on the first customer's request and found out what happens when you fail - you get to place a dice game to restore your sanity. It's actually pretty fun!

What happens if you lose all your sanity, I wonder? Game over?

Winning the game restarts the day and I figure out what went wrong - I missed that there was a map in the side-drawers of that symbol Ouija board and you can use is to visit other locations in the town to find artifacts there. That's the use for the clue delivered this morning, as well as other notes I've gotten or found.

Just visiting random locations will drain your energy so you can't just explore it all at once.

This morning's clue isn't too hard to figure out now that I have the map - and I found - something!

This is absolutely not what the customer wants but it's cool as hell.

The customer service as this shop absolutely sucks, because I'm now repeatedly leaving the shop while I have a customer waiting to bring in artifacts I found that the customer doesn't want. A+ would shop here again.

I don't think the customers get to complain though, I don't think they're giving me any money for these things. Maybe we've moved beyond the need for simple currency. Maybe Eli is going to be extremely pissed when he gets back.

I just noticed that in a nod to their other game, Strange Horticulture is also a store on the map so I decided to pay it a visit (My first customer of the day is still waiting for their Horned Shackle).

To my delight I returned from Strange Horticulture with one of that game's houseplants.

Now I've been thrown a curveball. This customer wants a Moon Heart for their grandmother, but crucially I don't have an entry for that in my book so I can't look up anything about one. And instead of a clearly identified object the 'hand thing to customer circle' just says '???'

Does this mean I can just give her anything and hope for the best?

Turns out the answer is no - the reference book does actually list the correct item under another name, and after one failure I find the correct one. Some of my attempts at pre-identifying things have been wrong.

The next customer wants to lay a trap for someone that's been stealing from them, and this time I get a choice - I can present one of two items.

I think I've identified both options so it's more about what effect I want to have on the prospective thief.

A binding seed amplifies feelings of guilt and shame, whereas a Zeah instills fear and paranoia - and is noted as being very difficult to remove. It would of course be right an appropriate for a thief to feel guilt over their act - but what would that really accomplish? An apology to my customer? Apologies aren't going to pay the bills around here, whereas someone stuck with some sort of paranoia curse just might waltz in here asking for a cure.

Madam, here is your Zeah, best of luck. It's the cooler looking of the two anyway, no guarantee the thief would bother stealing a binding seed.

As the day comes to a close I look for any symbols on unidentified items to see if that can help discern their purpose, and I try visiting some locations in town with my spare energy still left. One of the locations was mentioned in the book and the visit provides some additional info about the item. Day 3 brings the scales into use for the first time as I try to find an item that weighs exactly one pound. Apparently a Mr. Hungerford has been found and his eyes are completely black, Mrs. Robertson is a doctor and is trying to cure him.

It's not great when your doctor walks into a shop like this

Oh, oh this so good. I wrote the 'make the thief paranoid so they'll come into the shop and buy something' mainly as a joke, but lo and behold!

She's even wearing the Zeah she stole, I am thrilled beyond words.

So, lesson learned - sowing discord among the population will increase business.

Eli is going to be so proud of me when he gets back.

Or not, considering I just figured out how to open up the locked cabinet and get to the good stuff.

Hello my pretties, what do you all do?

I love a good mystery, and Strange Antiquities is full of them. One of the items behind the cabinet is a compass-like object that points at two other objects in the shop - one that I found exploring town and the other also from the locked cabinet. I have no clue what any of the three actually are, all I know is that they are somehow related. And possibly dangerous.

Day 4: Eli actually came back! I had really been expecting some terrible fate to befall him leaving me in control of the shop, but no, he actually returns after a few days just as he said he would.

Hey boss, welcome back! I've been trying to label some of these, would you mind help... annnnd he's gone.

Most of Day 4's customers want items that I already identified and the day goes pretty smoothly. At the end of it Edmund Bishop returns to invite me to their castle to look for additional things to help with the raven problem.

It's a whole new map to explore!

In the castle I discover another reference book - by Eli White. He really should have taught me more of this stuff, he's an awful person to be an apprentice for.

Remember that claw holding a gemstone that I said was super cool earlier? Looks like it's also super evil.

Exploring the castle I try to go down to the Vaults, and there I discover that those are locked (as one might expect of vaults). I need some sort of artifact to open these doors.

There's more secrets to unlock than just what's in my shop.

Now that I'm understanding the meaning of gemstones and symbols I think I'm beginning to understand some of these artifacts without the benefit of a specific entry in the book.

I believe this amulet is for weather prediction, for example.

I believe this because the central gemstone of Jade is related to earth and nature (or it might be Malachite which is for 'seeing'), and the symbols carved around it are all weather related like snow, thunder, rain. I'm very confident that it's weather related at the very least.

Eli has departed again - he's going to go contact the Order of the Black veil to help figure out this raven / black eyes problem. Since the shop was still standing he figured it was in good hands.

So far I've been surprised to be wrong about the identification of a couple objects, and almost always it's because I looked at some obvious characteristic of the object and didn't take the time to look into the minute details or subtle clues that might have told me something was off about the identification. Handing over an object and positively identifying it often reveals another book page, and I'm regularly finding new artifacts at various locations, so even as I identify what I have and check off another possibility, new possibilities arise and I've gotten no closer to identifying the remaining mysteries via process of elimination. So even after several days of identifying objects, the process of doing so remains a fascinating challenge.

Clues can be anywhere. This depiction of Holgar holds a wealth of clues and it helped me identify an item other than the Heart Chamber

I was paid a visit by a priestess named Audrey Bell. The game helpfully gives you a character profile for important people as well as their conversation history.

From the sound of it she might be pro-whatever-is-going-on-with-the-ravens

You know what? The author of the artifact identification book did a terrible job. Where there are illustrations, it's almost never an illustration of the artifact!

Nice picture of the map you would use it on. WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

I haven't been able to make much progress on the puzzles inside the shop - I think I only managed to unlock the locked cabinet. At least for the three pedestals under the counter, I needed the correct three items - and a Librarian, Simone Green, has arrived with clues about what they are.

Apparently nobody knows who built Strange Antiquities, and not even Eli knows all of its secrets.

Easy enough now! The plinths opened up a whole cabinet with a mug set and an artifact that makes me question one of my earlier tentative identifications.

I do like the mugs, maybe we can host a tea party.

I'm really enjoying the aesthetics of these items, and I wouldn't hate decorating my house with some of them.

One of the customers delivered me an entry on what she thinks may be causing the blackened eyes.

Seems plausible. I can't see object fields yet so I have no idea if I have one in the shop.

A repairman stopped by with a trinket that Eli had asked him to repair. I quickly recognized it as a very fancy answer to one of the shop puzzles, and found a book that Eli had hidden away.

It's a book on curses and their effects. We may be playing doctor soon.

I perused the book but none of the curses listed cause the black eyes I've been hearing about.

The time to play doctor came more rapidly than I thought - though this is for trying to treat the black eyes rather than a known curse. The Witch's finger causes pain and possibly death, so that seems like the more extreme treatment - we'll try her recommendation of the teacup. Plus I have a pretty darn good idea of what item the Witch's finger is, so I can use this to figure out which mug the Restful Mether is from among my mug collection.

What I'd really like to do is give her both and tell her to go to town on treatments.

The shop is getting cluttered and I'm not even halfway through the game (I think it lasts about 17 days according to the mid-day calendar) - we're on day 8. I really want to organize the shop items better but I'm really not sure HOW to organize them. Alphabetical would be ideal since people usually ask for items by name except I have no idea what letter the unidentified items start with. Francesca is worried that her sister Bonnie blames Mr. Potter for whatever is going on with the Ravens and the black eye curse and she might try to do something dumb. She implores me to not give her anything dangerous if she comes in. Doctor, it's your responsibility to talk to your sister, not mine to make sure she doesn't get her hands on a powerful artifact. At this store, the customer is always right.

Artifacts don't kill people, people kill people.

Speaking of dangerous - back with the blind artist Rebecca Rose came in, I had a choice to either give her an item that would let her experience synesthesia so she could feel / hear colors, or a spirit eye that would let her see into the other realm (but with some pretty dark side effects. I went with the latter, and she's back now with some insights into what could be going on - something involving the old gods.

You have to break a few minds to figure out some mysteries. Keep using that Eye, Rose!

Bonnie drops by as the doctor promised. She walks out of the store with that badass claw rock thing.

Whatever this is Bonnie please use it responsibly, bye now!

The adventurer with an eyepatch dropped by and traded me this map of the catacombs for an item. I say 'Traded' but I guess once I have an item I have a large stock of them, giving a customer an item doesn't actually remove it from the shop. Which is a big part of the reason the place is getting cluttered up.

The clutter is not going to get better from exploring these catacombs to find even more items

Satisfying customers is getting more elaborate - this gentlemen thinks he's been cursed, which entails figuring out what the curse is from his description of symptoms, and then looking up that curse in the index of the object identification book to see what items, if any, will help. If there isn't an explicit reference to the curse I may have to infer what could work based on item descriptions.

And do it all with no degree in medicine or witchcraft.

Oh, clever. The plinths (buttons) at the bottom are more than one puzzle - different sets of three items can unlock new finds in the shop. I feel very proud of what I figured out to obtain this skull thing.

The sound this makes when you listen to it is spine chilling.

At the end of the day I succumbed to my desire to organize the shop and did so alphabetically. Here's how the left-right sides look now - items proceed as A-M, then unidentified items on the middle shelves so I can always see them, followed by N-Z (and a couple more unidentified items below the counter).

It took awhile to do this but I'm happy with the result.

This will help with a lingering issue which is that I've tentatively identified (white label) many of these items by name but I haven't had the chance to give them to a customer which would confirm the identification (colored label) - and the book entry doesn't get checked off unless you get that positive identification. This system makes it easy to check if I've identified a specific item's book entry or not and it's clear where I should put newly identified items in the future.

The unidentified items shelf is still a little cluttered but that will only encourage me to identify them.

Adding to my scientific arsenal, I have unlocked the Ouija board-thing and can now view the Thaumic Fields of objects.

One of the clues indicates that a certain type of mug has a stronger field than the others.

There's a mode for this table which lets you move metal shapes around to form the Thaumic symbols and see what each field type looks like. Thus far in the game I've been avoiding taking external notes - the labeling system on objects has been good enough - but at this point I'm saving a separate folder with screenshots of the field / symbol connections so I can connect the Thaumic symbols to field shapes.

A 'Noctic' field associates the object with night time.

Once I become a real Thaumaturge I'm going to propose that we ditch the old Thaumic symbols and replace them with these field shapes, might as well cut out the middle man. I'm going through the objects and observing their fields when I find that this creepy one doesn't appear to have a field, or it's got a field that isn't like any of the others - it's sort of an unformed circle.

This skeletal bird head was in the locked cabinet and I have yet to identify it but I hope it has a series of smaller skeletal bird heads inside.

Day 11 - Eli's off on yet another trip. Meanwhile things are starting to get very concerning in town. I was exploring and ended up stumbling on this.

You know I'm not sure I actually want to live here.

Rebecca Rose has seen more with the Spirit Eye - she says the Nameless Gods are concerned because what's happening is related to something called the Nalean Casket. They're afraid that some person will open it and waste all of it's power, spilling it out. I almost ended up screwing myself by getting into the locked cabinet a long time ago, because Mrs. Robertson here wants something that was in it - and for the life of me it's been so long since I opened it that I don't remember everything that used to be in it - reorganizing the shop moved everything around. In my case, I can reference my own work here - I took a screenshot back when I was eyeing the goodies within.

Suck it non-bloggers.

Looks like Bonnie irresponsibly attacked Potter (with the dangerous relic I sold to her, granted) and managed to give him some grey hair - and now he's come in to buy a protective trinket!

I'm an incredible businessman!

Each day reveals a short part of a story that I assume will help reveal what's going on - a casket features heavily, which matches with Rose's Spirit Eye visions.

The Casket appears to infect people's minds and turn their eyes black.

A new customer walks in and she's not looking good at all. Between what can happen to people from dangerous plants and artifacts plus the terrifying possibilities of god-knows-what diseases out there, doctors in Undermere must have a really tough job.

Game 3 in the series: Strange Maladies? Strange Remedies?

Audrey Bell, the priestess (or really feels more like cult leader) wants my help again. I can either sabotage her or give her the strength she wants.

She seems pretty evil, but it's wrong to look down on people's religious beliefs so I give her the good stuff.

My explorations have yielded two pieces of a torn note that explains what I need to get inside the castle vault. Should be simple now. Like most discoveries this yields just a little bit - a single item and a piece of paper. The most I ever found at once was four items and a tile for the Thaumic board.

Can I get a set of these to use as coasters?

You don't often get to actually use these neat artifacts, but I'm happy to report that's not true of all of them - some of their powers are required for solving various puzzles, such as accessing the deeper regions of the catacombs. Our resident cult leader is back and she's totally happy with me. She suggests that when the time comes I should perform a ritual for Holgar.

I get the sense there are multiple endings to the game.

There's probably an ending involving the adventurer with the eyepatch but he bailed earlier, I gave him an item that let him enter a portal and he took one look and noped out. The Holgar ritual doesn't seem too hard, I'll definitely think about it. Holgar seems cool.

Warrior god huh? I probably have all these on the shelves somewhere, maybe.

Well, this is concerning. Verona Green appears to have lost her battle with the dark forces affecting the town.

At least the dark forces that control her mind have more respect for me than my boss Eli.

I'm not down with whatever power the Casket represents, so I hand over an item that I hope will cause Verona to win the internal battle and hope for the best. The story is revealing itself both through the characters that come to the shop and the midnight vignettes. It looks like Potter, the adventurer with the eyepatch, found the Nalean Casket along with a partner. The Casket ended up messing up Potter's eye and his partner was killed, and Potter ended up giving the Casket to Eli's brother, the curator of the museum. The casket is there now and its power is seeping out and corrupting the town. The book entry on the Heart Chamber mentions that legend says that Holgar trapped the soul of a great beast in the Catacombs in something called the Wraith Chamber. I'm wondering if that IS the Nalean Casket. (I can confirm that there is indeed a ridiculously large skull of a beast in the Catacombs which lends weight to the legend). The museum curator, Thaddeus White, has come to me and admitted that he has the casket - has had it for years. This feels like a huge choice - either give him at item that will (hopefully) keep the mind-controlled people from getting into the museum, or help him bring the Casket to my shop.

Bring it, curator. I am not afraid.

As the days wind to a close, we're getting into process-of-elimination identification of items with pretty vague descriptions.

Great writeup, very informative, A++ reference book

Eli has returned - only to leave again immediately. He leaves me a ritual that can be used to destroy the casket, which is what he thinks should be done.

It's actually been a lot of extra work no thanks to you, boss.

Come to think of it, I've done a much better job running the shop than Eli ever did. We now carry four, maybe five times as many artifacts as we did when Eli ran the place. And my exceptional business acumen (Letting people run around with very dangerous things) means that business is better than ever! I've reached the final day. It starts with bad news - the Curator can't find the casket. It's gone. I find a note that was slipped into a drawer that used to be empty. The clue leads me to find this:

I think I have the Casket now.

Eli helpfully returns to tell me that he moved it overnight - it's definitely the casket. He tells me to take to the pit where it can be destroyed.

Eli is going to be very disappointed in me.

This is Holgar's mess (maybe), and he seems like a cool guy. Let's do this! Unfortunately I don't get to meet Holgar. Turns out this ritual needs a sacrifice.

Ok, maybe this was a bad idea. I should have brought a +1

Thanks to some quick thinking the Priestess ends up as the sacrifice instead of me, but things don't turn out great for the town when the followers of Holgar open the Casket.

I mean, when you put it THAT way it sounds like I didn't think this through very well.

I had a great time with this one - my mind was constantly engaged in a delightful exploration of possibilities right to the end, and if the idea of discovering and deducing the properties of a world of unusual objects appeals to you then I can't recommend this (and its botanical predecessor) enough.